I'm going to reply to all the messages above here...
From: Sherm Pendley - view profile
Sherm Pendley wrote:
Quote:
First, configure your web server to return a 301 Moved Permanently
for the old URLs. That will redirect requests for the old URLs to the
new ones. If you're using Apache, you can use the RedirectPermanent
directive for that.
Can you elaborate slightly on this... we're using hostmonster for our
hosting and they've been quite helpful but I think I need to know a bit
more before I ask for this...
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The 301 redirect only takes an additional fraction of a second, even
on dial-up, so you don't need to feel pressured to find and fix every
last link at the same time. That kind of pressure often leads to a
rushed job, which leads to mistakes.
I certainly understand mistakes... I've been there, done that...
I've edited the 404 page as a stopgap... see
<http://www.repeater-builder.com/404.html>
Lars Eighner wrote:
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To maintain a site like that I think you need some combination of
a database and a scripting or preprocessing language.
The database woudl certainly help, and the hosting comany offers
MySQL, PostgreSQL, but I havent' learned that (yet)
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This would allow you to refer to links symbolically in page
templates, change the links as necessary in your database,
and generate pages with the scripting or preprocessing language.
I'm not sure what they offer there...
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For the scripting/preprocessing component, the major choices
are perl and PHP. Although PHP is widely used to generate
pages dynamically, it can also be used as an offline preprocessor
(CLI --- command line interface). Both PHP and perl have
support for a variety of databases, one of which is likely to be
suitable to your platform. A make utilitity is also very handy
for keeping track of dependencies so you need only regenerate
those pages actually affected by particular changes instead of
having to regenerate the whole site for every little change.
I'm familiar withthe concept of make - but the last two major software
development projects I worked on were on a minicomputer (Data
General, in assembly code, 20 years ago, a process control
application, 250,000 lines of code) and on a microprocessor (Z80,
47,000 lines of assembly, boiled down to 40k of binary).
Ben C. wrote:
Quote:
We don't know exact details, but what you want is fairly easy
to do with a short script in Python, Tcl, Perl etc., or even with
a powerful text editor like vim.
Here's a sample file from the site, showing the links in the top
left corner, and a second identical set at the bottom:
<http://www.repeater-builder.com/mitrek/mitrek-interfacing.html>
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If you don't know any of those tools, any time spent learning
any of them will quickly pay for itself.
I've done some playing with Perl, in fact I rewrote an auction script
that was in Perl... I did a draft web site for a Playmate and we had
an auction script going... it actually wrote the html code on the fly.
The auction never made it into the final web site...
Yes, I need to learn a lot more about text processing languages...
FWIW all updates are currently done by four people... the site
owner and I have complete copies of the entire web site on our
local hard drives, and the other two have copie sof their articles.
The current procedure is for the person to download a fresh copy
of any web page they are going to change, rename it to
(filename).yyyy-mm-dd.html, upload that file, then make the
changes to the original file, then upload it (overwriting the live
copy). If there's a problem, then any of us four can put the
old page back.
William Hughes wrote:
Their site has moved, might want to update your links...
I've got MultiEdit, but at first look that one looks better...
Quote:
FWIW, my site will eventually have 350+ pages. Moving,
renaming or splitting a file has serious ramifications.
Exactly - that's why I'm here asking these questions...
Chris Beall wrote:
At a first read that will help a LOT !!! I like the ;#include... I
feel that some
kind of an include should have been in html from the beginning...
that
would have made headers and footers a lot easier.
"Alex" wrote:
Quote:
Mike, The latest version of Frontpage, 2003, fixes many of
the gripes you have about bloat, auto-reformatting, etc. It
also can optimize your HTML, to remove comments and
extra spaces for even faster download time. FP 2003, like
Dreamweaver, allows you to use Dynamic Web Templates,
which could help you quickly update large number of pages
in batches with standardized headers, footers, navigation, etc.
As you noted, FP does allow you to move or pages from within
a GUI and automatically manage the links, etc. The successor
to FP is Expression Web
(
http://www.microsoft.com/products/ex...ion-Web/defaul...)
which has a free trial available.
I'd love to have a hourlong sit-down session with a Dreamweaver
guru and get a feel for it... (I'm in the Pasadena, Calif. area if
anybody
is local to me). I have no problem with buying a copy if it will
actually
scratch my itch.
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Hand coding may get you leaner pages, but with 600 pages to
update and reorganize, it might make sense for you to find a
tool that will maximize your productivity and provide a path for
easier maintenance over time.
(nods head) I totally agree.
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There's a good reason that a lot of professional web developers,
for whom time is money, use DreamWeaver (fewer use FP, which
because of flaws in earlier versions is still perceived as more of an
amateur's tool) rather than Notepad, etc.
The team used text editors a lot due to the behind-your-back rewriting
that a lot of earlier tools did. The site was first started in March
of
1995, and many of the oldest pages were done in Netscape Composer
and later on, Front Page 97.
Have you seen the bloat that Word 2000 produces with "Save As"
html ??? That's the kind of stuff I'm referring to when I say "Bloat".
I've got several contributors that send me Word files... it's not
unusual
to take a 250kb file and whittle it down to under 50kb just by trashing
the <p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify'(and variants)
stuff.
I'd love to see a "Save As HTML 3" option.
David E. Ross wrote:
Quote:
First of all, as you work on individual pages within your
site, change all links to other file within the same site
to use relative URLs. This can be done over a period of time.
We've been doing that...
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Try an experiment. Install both FrontPage and Nvu (freeware
available for Windows at <http://www.nvu.com/>). After fixing
one page with FrontPage, note all the other pages that are
affected and adjusted by FrontPage. Then make a negligible
change to each with Nvu. See if Nvu reduces the bloat.
I've downloaded Nvu, and I'm going to borrow a copy of FP 2003
based on comments above and below.
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I've never used FrontPage, but I have tried Nvu. The latter
seems to create pages that are compliant with the HTML 4.0
specification. I still use Wordpad (not Notepad) to create and
maintain my site (344 pages). I don't use Nvu because I don't
like the way it formats source files. (But that's a personal
judgement based on aesthetics and not on technical merit.)
I've looked at your site, and am impressed. I clicked on your
loation link and discovered that I was less than 10 miles from
your location a week ago. Mabe we can cross paths sometime.
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Since I didn't use Nvu extensively, I didn't learn all its features.
It might even have the same capability as FrontPage to update
links in affected pages when you change one page.
I'll play with it and see what it can do. Thanks for the pointer.
John Hosking wrote:
Quote:
This may be only half-helpful at best, but maybe you or
somebody else can use it.
>
FrontPage 2002 (and I had *thought*, FP 2000, but I don't
have it around) has a switch to preserve source code
formatting (who says Microsoft doesn't listen?). It's under
Tools - Page Options (which doesn't mean it affects just
the *current page's* options; rather, it concerns options
which affect the *pages*). On the "HTML Source" tab
choose the "Preserve existing HTML" radio button. It seems
(or seemed) to do it for me. FrontPage 98, I remember clearly,
was quite merciless about changing code.
As I said above, a lot of the work was done with FP97 and
Netscape Composer... in fact the last Composer user switched
about 11 months ago.
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Mmm, before I sign off, you might also look at the Compatibility
tab on the same Page Options window. If you're getting a bunch
of DIVs added, maybe you can try dialling down the CSS and
DHTML levels.
Speaking of CSS, that's another thing I've got to learn.
This is part of the "standard" page template and I've been told
that it would be a simple thing to put into a CSS file:
<body lang="EN-US" bgcolor="#C0C0C0" background="/pix/rbtip.gif"
text="#000000"
leftmargin="20" rightmargin="20" topmargin="20" bottommargin="20"
marginwidth="20" marginheight="20">
<!-- Netscape specific: marginheight is the top margin,
marginwidth=left margin -->
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If you can convince FP not to hack your code, but just make
the link changes (and you've already got it handy), then you
should be able to import your web, change the links site-wide,
then just grab the changed HTML files (turn off FP and put it
back in the closet), ignoring all the nasty _vti files and folders.
As I said, I'm going to borrow a copy of FP 2003 and play with it.
If I can load the site into it, relocate a folder within the tree, and
have ONLY the hard coded inter-file links that are contained in
the other files change (i.e no other reformatting done) then FP
will scratch my itch. If it does any other changes, then it's
getting trashed.
My current thinking is that my fallback is a multi-file editor of
some sort.
Toby Inkster wrote:
Quote:
Get yourself a decent SQL-database-backed content
management system. Getting all your pages *into* the
CMS will be a pain, but you'll only have to do it once.
(If you know a bit of Perl, you may be able to automate
some of it.)
You'll thank yourself in the future.
The hosting comany offers:
Drupal
Geeklog
Joomla
Mambo Open Source
PHP-Nuke
phpWCMS
phpWebSite
Post-Nuke
Siteframe
Xoops
dotProject
PHProjekt
Anybody have any comments on any of them?
All they are to me (right now) is names...
Chaddy2222 wrote:
Quote:
David E. Ross wrote:
Quote:
I've never used FrontPage, but I have tried Nvu. The latter seems to
create pages that are compliant with the HTML 4.0 specification. I
still use Wordpad (not Notepad) to create and maintain my site (344
pages). I don't use Nvu because I don't like the way it formats source
files. (But that's a personal judgement based on aesthetics and not on
technical merit.)
>
Try HandCoder, it's an extension for NVU, it runs useing HTML Tidy,
which you will need as well.
It re-formats your code in to a nicely indented page so you can edit it
in an external editor if need be.
I've used Tidy... it does a lot of good, but insists on replacing </p>
with <br><brand then complains that <brshould be <br />
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Since I didn't use Nvu extensively, I didn't learn all its features. It
might even have the same capability as FrontPage to update links in
affected pages when you change one page.
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It does, but the feature is not fully functional.
Although you can download an extension that
will fix the problem, (though I have never used it).
Which one?
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I now a days, create my pages in NVU, then just
use HandCoder to tidy up the code and I then just
use PHP includes, written in HTML-Kit or NotePad
(depending on if I want the extra features or not).
Andy Dingley wrote:
Quote:
mike wrote:
>
Quote:
I help manage a large web site, one that has over
600 html pages.
>
You have several destinations you could end up. Decide on which one,
then worry about how to get there.
>
The options are:
>
* Static HTML pages
Which is what we have now.
Quote:
* Static XML text with off-line publishing. The content
gets turned into static XML files in something like DocBook
or even HTML itself, and then an XSLT transform converts
it to HTML and sorts out the many links.
I'll have to look at DocBook, until your message I had
no idea it existed.
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* SQL database content store and a few dynamic page
generators. This can run on-line or off-line (a bit like #2,
make a copy of the site as static HTML, then upload it
and pretend it's option #1)
As I said above, I have a copy of the site on my home machine.
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* CMS
Don't write your own, download an open-source one and use that.
As I said above, the hosting comany offers several (listed above),
and I'd like comments on them.
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* Wiki
Don't write your own, download an open-source one and use that (and
I'd suggest MediaWiki)
They offer:
TikiWiki
PhpWiki
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Your choice between these should be based on the end results and a
long-term view of how you'll manage things for the next few years,
including further refactorings like this and possible the addition of
major new facilities.
We just moved to a new hosting company in December, and that
was the first major change in 10 years. The site is run totally by
volunteers, and is funded by donations. The only current plans are
to add a few more helpers... nobody has looked much at site
management except me.
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Don't base your choice of destination on the options for
conversion alone. It's a big site, it has plenty of resource
it can call on. To be honest, when I hear "Frontpage"
discussed as a possible tool here I lose heart that it will
ever work again. That's _entirely_ the wrong sort of tool
to be using, at a level that's deeper than any M$oft
flamewar over "M$ tools make lousy code".
The only reason I even mentioned it was that it was used before,
and that I may have access to a copy of FP2003. If it can fix the
links *and change nothing else* then it scratches my current itch...
I do not see it as a viable long-term management tool.
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Don't focus on the finished site either. You also need to
create these pages and presumably a lot of people need
to create more of the same.
This itself is a strong argument for using a good Wiki.
We have a large number of contributors, some of which
have asked to be anonymous. If you look at the site
(
www.repeater-builder.com) you will see a lot of donations
credited to A. Nony Mous.
I would love to be able to take their contributions and NOT
have to spend hours converting their Word files or emails
into html pages.
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While you're making this change, write some standards
for the quality of the final pages. This is a very good time
to think about making them accessible and standards-based.
Already in progress.
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Please ask c.i.w.a.h for advice on these standards though,
don't just adopt XHTML blindly because it's the latest thing around.
I look skeptically at anything designed by a committe. Something
is always overdone, or left out. Look at RS-232 - a complete spec
except for the connector itself. Fortunately the Canon Corp DB25
was settled on, but 20 years later IBM flipped the sex over... until
the PC came along the computer port was always female and the
cable was always male. IBMs response? the connector was never
specified in the standard.
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As a final issue, try to manage the migration from one to the
other in terms of search engine ratings. Intelligent use of 301s
can help, lots of use of 301s might make the change entirely
invisible.
Not too worried about ratings as this is a labor-of-love donation-run
reference website for a bunch of radio geeks, and there is pretty
much no competition. In any other environment I'd be in total
agreement. BTW, we've got folks that run some of the largest
public safety communications systems (i.e. Los Angeles County
Sheriffs, California Highway Patrol, Nevada Highway Patrol, FBI,
and others sharing info with us and using us for information.
We've got a Yahoogroup with over 3500 members and the web
site is basically an information warehouse.
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On the whole though, just make the best site you can,
Doing that.
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give it a logical structure
That's why we are trying to rearrange the folders on the server - to
make the structure easier for the helpers to understand.
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with good navigation,
Working on that...
I'd love to make the links on the top left of the page automated
my a make process.
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write a sitemap for Google and then let Google sort things out for itself.
Huh?
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Unless you're actually competing for
keywords with other sites, the best SEO is simply to have a good site
with good content.
No competing involved (see above).
I appreciate all the responses, and am looking forward to any
replies to this message.
Mike Morris
